Alasdair Palmer is the Public Policy Editor of the Sunday Telegraph. He has previously worked for the Spectator and won the Douglas Home Prize for Journalism in 2002. He is married with two children.

Sharon Shoesmith is only part of the problem

Sharon Shoesmith – who ran Haringey social services when Baby P was murdered after social workers had decided to leave the child with her mother because they thought she posed no threat – is right. She has been badly treated. But not by Ed Balls, who sacked her. The people who went too far were the ones who left death threats on her answering machine and her email in-box. She didn't deserve that kind of treatment.

But Sharon Shoesmith's inability to understand that she or her colleagues did anything wrong is unfortunately typical of the whole social services profession. Ed Balls was right to remove her, but he's wrong to suggest that the fault with social services can be laid at the door of one incompetent individual. By social services' standards, Sharon Shoesmith wasn't particularly incompetent, and she can produce reports by the inspectorate to prove it.

The problem is much deeper than one individual who failed to take responsibility for her own or her staff's blunders. It is that social services' staff do not know what they are doing. They do not have a clear idea of how to protect and promote the interests of children, because no one can tell them, in a clear and useable way, what promoting and protecting those interests consist in. The Gvernment guidance does not specify it. The inspectorate has no clear notion of it (which is why they failed to identify the obvious before Baby P died: Haringey social workers were failing to protect the interests of the children under their care). And neither do front-line social workers or their bosses, such as Sharon Shoesmith. It is no wonder that they fail to detect monstrous abuse when they do not understand what they should be looking for.

In her attempts at self-justification, Ms Shoesmith herself emphasises that "You can't stop those who are determined to kill their children". But that it false: you can stop it, by identifying abusive parents early and taking their children from them. In her effort to excuse herself, Ms Shoesmith seems to have forgotten that that is precisely what social services say they do. If it is true that "You can't stop those who are determined to kill their children", what is the point of the multi-billion pound social services network of which Ms Shoesmith used to be a part? If it cannot protect children – why do we bother with it? Perhaps Ed Balls will answer that question when he next makes a statement on the role and value of social services. But I doubt it.